Quotes from Jennifer Egan

wishes she were daring, risqué, all the things she has never been and will never be.

His eyes weren't closed like they used to be when he'd make Danny tell about an ice castle on Pluto where a band of pirates lived. But wanting to be told a story, entertained, however that looks on a person's face--Danny saw this now and remembered it. It filled him with relief.

She was 'clean': no piercings, tattoos or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage

As children, Grace and I liked to pretend our life was a movie projected onto a giant screen before an audience who watched, rapt, as we ate our pork chops and finished our homework and went to sleep side by side in our twin beds, Grace rising to shut the closet door if I left it open. Gradually, mysteriously, that fantasy evolved into a vocation--I came to imagine my future not in terms of anything I might do or accomplish, but the notoriety that would follow.

Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

This is it," I sob, clinging to Angel and Liz, their warm shoulders. I hear them crying, too, and think, It will be like this always. From now on, nothing can divide us.

There is nothing original about human behavior.

But I don't want to fade away, I want to flame away—I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

People had to do something to shake things up or they would've keeled over from misery and boredom. So Christ came to dinner. Witches and goblins were hiding in corners. People looked at the sky and saw angels. And my idea--my, my...plan, my-- Mick: Mission. He didn't pause in his sanding. My mission is to bring some of that back. Let people be tourists of their own imaginations.

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.

He'd take danger over sorrow every time.

Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness.

We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

Your desultory twenties," my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I'm praying it's over.

At first I thought he was having a stroke or a heart attack, but then I realized I was seeing pure misery, the kind people only show when they think they're by themselves.

Trivial, yes. But I was aiming for the mirrored room. There was nothing more essential in the world; nothing that failed, when placed beside it, to disappear completely.

I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I'm keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank.

Dunellen was childless, an oddity in this milieu, where the average man had between four and ten offspring.

It's the weird and terrible way of this place that a little thing, a hand on a head, can matter so much.

But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information. What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.

Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny, and it sure as hell was easier to land than a decent apartment.